NAUT

Good day, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Nautilus Biotechnology second quarter 2026 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your speaker today, Ji-Yon Yi with the Gilmartin Group. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Earlier today, Nautilus released financial results for the quarter ended June 30, 2026. If you haven't received this news release or if you would like to be added to the company's distribution list, please send an email to [email protected]. Joining me today from Nautilus are Sujal Patel, Co-Founder and CEO, Parag Mallick, Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, and Anna Mowry, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I would like to remind you that management will make statements during this call that are forward-looking within the meaning of the Federal Securities laws. These statements involve material risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to materially differ from those anticipated. Additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties appears in the section entitled forward-looking statements in the press release Nautilus issued today.

Except as required by law, Nautilus disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any financial or product pipeline projections or other forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events, or otherwise. This conference call contains time sensitive information and is accurate only as of the live broadcast on July 28, 2026. With that, I will turn the call over to Sujal.

Thanks, Ji-Yon, and thank you all for joining us today. We have spent the last nine years building what I believe is one of the most innovative platforms in life sciences. It produces a layer of biological insight that we believe does not exist anywhere else in the world today. This is the conclusion we are hearing from a growing number of scientists once they see our data, and it is the reason I am confident about where this company is headed. We believe that a platform this capable has many possible applications. We have walked you through them on these calls over the past few years. This quarter, I want to focus on a deliberate strategic realignment of where we point the platform and on the reasoning behind it. Let me start with the decision itself. We are moving a significant share of our R&D resources from our Broadscale application to our proteoform application.

We're doing it for two reasons that reinforce each other. The first is genuine momentum. The scientific community is telling us directly in conference halls and in our own sales conversations that proteoform resolution is a critical, differentiated layer of biological insight and one we believe we can uniquely put in customers' hands today. The second is that Broadscale needs more time, and I'll come back to that in a moment. Let me say more about that first reason. Since launch, we have seen strong and growing customer enthusiasm for the proteoform approach and the unique insight it can deliver, including numerous additional customer-requested proteoform targets. The feedback coming through our sales team this year has been consistent, and it represents what we believe to be a substantial commercial opportunity.

Given the potential scale of that opportunity and our technical performance to date, we're significantly shifting resources across the company and putting a new roadmap in place to accelerate our proteoform applications. We're also going to lean harder into partnerships with pharma and academic institutions to push these capabilities further and faster than we could on our own. This is not a sudden shift. Anyone who's followed the company over the past year will recognize the trajectory that's been pushing us in this direction. When we set out to build our Iterative Mapping applications, we expected Broadscale first and proteoform second. Our platform matured in the opposite order, and we've been turning the proteoform dial up quarter after quarter. Let me lay that trajectory out.

A year ago, a preprint with our collaborators showed for the first time that we could measure tau proteoforms at a resolution no one had ever achieved. Next, we signed a collaboration with the Allen Institute for brain sciences to analyze human brain samples spanning multiple brain regions, genetic backgrounds, and disease severities. Our alpha instrument at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging also began producing real biological data, and that data was presented at major scientific conferences, revealing biology in Alzheimer's that the field has chased for decades and never been able to see. In the first quarter, The Michael J. Fox Foundation funded us to build the next proteoform assay for Parkinson's, and Baylor College of Medicine became our first early access customer for tau. Now, in the second quarter, we recognized our first revenue from both Baylor College and The Michael J. Fox Foundation grant funded development work.

We also selected AKT1 as our first oncology proteoform assay, one of three oncology targets that have now cleared our development criteria. Parag will take you inside the science and the data behind each of these steps in a few minutes. Let me come back to the second reason. Broadscale, our broad proteome application is behind the timeline we set. In the second quarter, we completed testing and determined that our assay configuration changes did not sufficiently improve probe candidate performance to support a 2027 general availability of our Broadscale application at our target specifications. We have an exceptional team working on an extraordinarily hard problem, hard science is unpredictable. Some of the development efforts we're undertaking next, which Parag will describe in detail, are inherently long in duration, on the order of several quarters.

In the meantime, we're moving the majority of our application-specific R&D resources into proteoform development, keeping a focused team on the most critical parts of Broadscale to keep advancing the program and reduce its key technical risks. Shifting resources from Broadscale to proteoforms will impact the pace of development in Broadscale, but given the opportunity we're seeing in proteoforms, that's a trade-off that we're willing to make. Let me briefly touch on where this path could lead. As we continue to rapidly develop our proteoform portfolio and expand the capabilities of the assays, we believe new opportunities will arise that were not necessarily available to us with a Broadscale first format. Two of them are worth planting a flag on, even though they're both very early. The first is the clinical market.

Our original thinking with a Broadscale first path was that the Nautilus Voyager would primarily be a research use only tool. Our customers would make discoveries on that platform and then build their own high throughput, low cost test that they could carry into the clinic. What we're hearing now with proteoform capabilities in customers' hands is different. Customers are excited, and they believe for key markers in key disease areas, proteoform measurements are likely to translate directly into clinical research and eventually into diagnostics. While it's not our current focus, because there's no other platform that can make these measurements, it's conceivable that we could get pulled into the clinical market earlier than we'd planned, and we've begun to think about how to prepare for that. Second is pharma.

As we expand our conversations with pharma, they are thinking hard about how to combine different data modalities with AI models and use the results to advance therapeutic development, building therapies faster with a higher likelihood of success. We expect that as pharma begins to further appreciate that our proteoform capabilities provide one of the deepest layers of biological insight into disease state and cellular function, we believe opportunities will emerge to partner with pharma to go after new targets, generate datasets to feed AI models, and to add bespoke capabilities to existing assays that meet their specific needs. I want to be clear. Both of these are early, and while we're not putting a plan or a timeline around either of them today, we are beginning to build towards them.

Before turning it over to Parag, I want to reiterate that we have a platform that can deliver unique value to the market, and our customers are telling us that the most urgent need now is in proteoforms. Because of this, we've made a data-driven decision to concentrate on the value we can deliver today as quickly as we can. Parag will take you deeper into the science, and Anna will take you through the numbers before I close. Over to you, Parag.

Thanks, Sujal. I want to start with what we're hearing from customers because it is directly shaping how we work. The heart of it is one word, resolution. Our proteoform assays measure the specific molecular states of a protein, its isoform composition, and its patterns of modification at single molecule resolution with a sensitivity and reproducibility that we believe existing affinity assays and mass spectrometry methods cannot match. What customers tell us again and again is that this lets them see biology that was simply invisible to them before. Critically, proteoforms are more than just additional protein detail. The specific form a protein takes often determines everything that matters about it, where it goes in the cell, what complex it joins, what pathway it activates, what phenotype it ultimately drives.

This is one of the reasons the field collectively has struggled to make progress in diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's. Without the ability to resolve biology at this level, the most important signals have stayed out of reach. Let me add additional color to the trajectory Sujal described. A year ago, our preprint with Genentech, Mount Sinai, and the Neural Stem Cell Institute showed for the first time that we could resolve the tau proteoform landscape at single molecule resolution. Our alpha instrument at the Buck Institute then generated data at a median CV of roughly 5.5% against an industry norm closer to 25%. That data showed that different APOE genetic risk variants carry distinct tau proteoform signatures. This is a striking result that we believe is only measurable on our platform.

APOE is one of the best known genetic risk factors in Alzheimer's, yet it had never been linked to tau at a mechanistic level, and we feel that the difference we resolved is invisible to preexisting proteomic tools. We have also found that model systems widely used in Alzheimer's research show markedly different tau proteoform landscapes from one another, a distinction that we expect could prove critical to how drug developers choose their models. These are exactly the kinds of biological differences that bulk methods cannot see and that Iterative Mapping was built to reveal.

They are the kinds of findings that have led researchers to describe our data in their own words as, quote, "a game changer" and as something that, quote, "will become critical to their work." Now let me talk about oncology and specifically why we are leading with AKT1. In Q2, we narrowed our oncology work to three candidates, AKT1, EGFR, and p53, and developed them in parallel. All three cleared our reproducibility and accuracy criteria and moved into development, which is in itself an important proof point. It tells us our assay building methodology is now repeatable, not a one-time success with tau. AKT1 is furthest along, and we expect that it will be first to market. It is a compelling place to start for both scientific and commercial reasons. AKT1 sits at a control hub for cell growth and survival signaling.

There is already a multi-billion dollar market in AKT-targeted therapies, but those therapies have shown mixed clinical results, largely because patient selection relies on indirect biomarkers rather than direct evidence that the pathway is actually driving a given tumor. Proteoform-level resolution provides that direct readout. We anticipate it will be able to identify the patients who are truly dependent on the pathway. In other words, this is a way to improve response rates for drugs that are already on the market with exactly the kind of insight existing proteomics cannot reach. That brings me to why we expect that we can expand the proteoform portfolio so quickly. Proteoform development is now bottlenecked by capacity, not by scientific uncertainty. We have what we believe is a proven template.

We anticipate that the remaining unknowns on each new target are contained, adding people should translate directly into more assay content and more capabilities delivered faster. The math is compelling. Our tau assay took about five years to build. Our first oncology markers reached that same technical bar in about a year. As we scale the team, we expect to add new assays at a cadence measured in months rather than years, growing from a small handful of assays today toward roughly 20 proteoform assays anticipated by the middle of 2028. That speed lets us be disciplined about where we go next. We are prioritizing neuroscience, oncology, immunology, and cardiology. Within those areas, we look for targets with ready access to antibodies and a large market opportunity, which we assess through clinical trial activity, publications, NIH funding, and direct customer input.

Encouragingly, the demand we're hearing from customers lines up almost exactly with the internal target lists we had already built. The scaled-up proteoform development team will aim to qualify new antibodies, build controls and immunoprecipitation protocols, develop and qualify new sample types, and drive down the sample input required. Once we hit our performance criteria on a target, we plan to verify and validate the assay, bring in outside collaborators, and move to early access. The reallocation of our assay development resources does two things. It gives us the potential to bring new assay content to market on a regular, predictable cadence instead of in occasional bursts, and it is expected to pull forward the enabling capabilities customers ask for most. In particular, lower sample input requirements and access to new sample types, including biofluids like cerebrospinal fluid and plasma.

Biofluid access matters enormously because it is what unlocks the large majority of the biomarker market. Here is where that leaves the roadmap. Our tau proteoforms assay stays in early access with general availability of consumable kits expected in mid-2027. Our AKT1 proteoforms assay is anticipated to enter early access in late 2026, with general availability expected in mid-2027. A second oncology proteoforms assay is in development, also targeting general availability in mid-2027. We expect a third oncology proteoforms assay and continued expansion of the pipeline, with additional kits reaching general availability expected in late 2027. On enabling capabilities, we expect to bring a roughly 100-fold reduction in required sample input into early 2027 and to enable cerebrospinal fluid for our tau assay in 2028. You should expect a rolling series of announcements as new content and capabilities come online roughly every six months, increasingly driven by customer demand.

Anna will connect that roadmap plan, including the instrument timeline and the revenue outlook. Turning to Broadscale, the fundamentals of the program are solid. Our second quarter work reinforced the core premise that Iterative Mapping with trimer-based probes can decode the broad proteome. That same testing made clear that our current assay configuration does not yet deliver the performance we need on the timeline we had targeted. Therefore, we have concluded it will not support a 2027 general availability at our target specifications. The remaining work concentrates in three areas. The first is our probe library. We have more than enough performant probes to move forward, but we need to increase their diversity through affinity maturation, an inherently long lead time activity. The second is the machine learning layer, which keeps improving as we feed it more on-platform data.

The third is the assay architecture behind our configuration change, where we are working with our partners to stabilize the new assay platform so that we can detect true positive binding events more reliably. We are advancing these work streams in parallel. I am not going to put a new timeline on Broadscale today, but the underlying science is sound, and the program keeps moving forward even as the bulk of our development effort now goes to proteoforms. One critical area to discuss is how we fit into the world of AI for bio. The field is racing to apply AI to biology, but that work is only as good as the data underneath it. The genome is a blueprint, but proteins are the machines that carry out the work, and their functional state is what determines how a drug binds, whether it is toxic, and which patients respond.

That is precisely the layer today's models are missing because the data has never existed at the resolution and scale a model needs. We believe that the data that is needed is the data our platform produces. I'll leave it there for now, but it is a meaningful part of why the proteoform work excites me so much, well beyond any single assay. The world is desperate for differentiated data at scale. Before I hand it to Anna, let me place this in the broadest context I can. Every major advance in medicine has been unlocked by a new ability to read or write biology. Sequencing the genome gave us the foundation to identify genetic diseases faster than ever before. Our growing command of gene editing through tools like CRISPR has begun to deliver real relief from once intractable diseases.

I believe the proteoform resolution that Iterative Mapping uniquely provides is the next of those key breakthroughs, and that over time, it will translate into meaningful advances in how we understand and treat human disease. With that, I'll turn the call over to Anna.

Thanks, Parag. Let me start with the commercial and customer picture, and then I'll take you through the numbers, the resource shift, and our expectations for the coming quarters. Our early access program continued to broaden this quarter, although the number of active paying projects is still small. We've also built a commercial organization which now stands at three people, including our VP of Global Sales, and the number and quality of institutions in serious conversation with us has grown significantly. The sales team is in the field every day, and they describe a level of enthusiasm and receptivity that they say they've not seen anywhere else in their careers. A word of caution on the near term. This is a new team running new sales cycles, and converting early interest into signed paying engagements will take time.

Turning to revenue, which we are reporting for the first time this quarter. Total revenue was $0.2 million. The majority of that came from grant revenue from our The Michael J. Fox Foundation-funded alpha-synuclein proteoforms assay, with the remainder in service revenue from our first early access program project. As a reminder, the grant revenue funds development work, whose costs run through our R&D expense. Our early access engagements are designed primarily to give key opinion leaders access to our platform through a services model, not to generate meaningful revenue or margin at this stage. In practice, these are proof of concept studies. Customers are kicking the tires today with the goal that these early evaluations grow into larger, ongoing engagements over time. For the full year, we are maintaining our revenue guidance of approximately $0.5 million.

Total operating expenses were $15.9 million for the second quarter of 2026, a decrease of approximately 7% from the prior year period. Research and development expenses were $9.6 million, down approximately 8% from the prior year period, driven primarily by lower laboratory spending, lower stock-based compensation, and lower facilities costs. Selling general and administrative expenses were $6.3 million, down approximately 6% from the prior year period, driven primarily by lower salaries and related benefits, reflecting reduced incentive compensation expectations for the year and lower stock-based compensation. Net loss for the second quarter of 2026 was $14.5 million or $0.11 earnings per share, compared to a net loss of $15 million or $0.12 earnings per share in the prior year period. We continue to manage both operating expenses and cash prudently this quarter, and our results came in better than planned.

In fact, we now expect full year operating expenses to come in below prior guidance, representing year-over-year growth of less than 10%. We ended the second quarter with $129.2 million in cash equivalents, and investments, compared to $143.4 million at the end of the first quarter, reflecting cash usage of approximately $14.2 million in the quarter. Based on our current trajectory, we believe our financial plan supports a cash runway that extends into the first quarter of 2028. Let me put some numbers behind the resource shift Sujal and Parag described. In headcount terms, we are effectively tripling the number of people focused on our proteoform development efforts while reducing the Broadscale team by roughly half. That shift shows up in our application-specific R&D effort, which was previously weighted heavily towards Broadscale and is now roughly two-thirds proteoforms and one-third Broadscale.

The remainder of the R&D team works on elements of the platform common to every Iterative Mapping application, foundational work that benefits proteoforms and Broadscale alike, and that portion of the team is unchanged. Importantly, we are accelerating proteoform content and capability development and de-risking our path to commercialization, all within our planned spend envelope. Let me also connect the roadmap Parag described to the financials. In the near term, revenue is expected to continue to come primarily from grant funding and early access program services. On the platform, we remain on track to place a beta unit this year. From there, we expect to open the Voyager Platform for pre-orders in early 2027, with shipments beginning in mid-2027, timed to align with the proteoform assay consumable releases Parag outlined. That is when platform revenue begins.

The inflection point in instrument sales and consumables pull-through comes as our portfolio broadens through 2027 and into 2028. We'll refine that outlook as our portfolio and customer pipelines mature. Finally, on capital. Our cash on hand is expected to support operations into the first quarter of 2028. That said, we anticipate some level of fundraising between now and mid-2027 to support our proteoform expansion and broader market development. We are evaluating a combination of debt and equity, and we intend to approach it in the most prudent way possible. I want to be clear, though, we are not in a rush. We will raise when the combination of business catalysts and market conditions produces the best outcome for our company and our shareholders. Back to you, Sujal.

Thanks, Anna. Let me recap our priorities and why we believe this is the right strategic choice. We're putting the bulk of our resources behind proteoforms because that's where we can deliver unique value today. The message from our customers in the market is strong, and our plan is expected to expand our proteoform capability across more disease areas, more sample types, and more labs. We think this is also the fastest path to full commercialization. We believe that the science on proteoforms is largely behind us. What's left is execution, and that enables a more predictable timeline to general availability. None of this diminishes Broadscale. Measuring the entire proteome remains one of the large opportunities in our industry, and we intend to get there. We feel that the premise is sound, the remaining work is understood, and a focused team is staying on the hardest technical risk.

What has changed is sequencing, not conviction. Proteoforms now, because the market is asking for them and we believe we can deliver them, Broadscale when the technology is ready to deliver what customers need. We go into the second half with a clear mandate and cash expected to last into 2028. Our focus from here is delivering a wave of new proteoform assays with expanded capabilities, working alongside key opinion leaders and early customers to generate data and biological insight that cannot be generated elsewhere, and scaling our business in parallel. We will keep you up to date as we go. Thank you for joining us today. With that, we're happy to take your questions. Operator?

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. If you have a question or a comment at this time, please press star one one on your telephone. If your question has been answered and you wish to remove yourself from the queue, please press star one one again. We'll pause for a moment while we compile our Q&A roster. Our first question comes from Dan Brennan with TD Cowen. Your line is open.

Great. Thank you. Excellent. Maybe just the first one. You've got three salespeople, $130 million in cash, and as you mentioned, seven quarters of cash, but you're looking to find the right time to raise. Just walk through how you guys titrate the ability to expand the teams necessary to drive the revenue traction you need in order to support the business. I'm just trying to understand. Anna mentioned some unlocking events, I think, between now and mid 2027. Maybe can you just talk through a little bit about that pathway and how you manage the burn versus the commercial opportunity?

Sure. Maybe I'll tackle that, Dan. This is Sujal, and good morning to you. First and foremost, I think the way Anna and I think about this is making sure that the size of our commercial organization and those that are focused on talking to customers on a daily basis, making sure that team is right-sized for the serviceable opportunity that we have and being able to reach customers. One of the things, for example, that you see in our strategy is that the proteoforms that we are releasing today, even though they could be across oncology and neurodegeneration and cardiovascular and inflammatory disorders, it's concentrated in just two areas today, and that's to give us some efficiency in terms of who we're reaching out to, how we're going to market, what trade shows we're getting to. There's inherently efficiency built into this strategy to start with.

Second, because the technology, this proteoform capability, is so unique, what we're finding is that customers are very willing to have conversations to learn more about it. We're pretty comfortable right now with the team that we have. Just so you have a full sense of what that team looks like, there's Amber Faust, who's our VP of Global Sales. There's a roughly East-West type of sales rep leader on each side of the country. As well, we have a couple of folks in scientific engagement and scientific affairs who are out interfacing with customers on a daily basis as well. We feel very comfortable that that core nucleus is good for the neurodegeneration work we're doing with tau and with the early work that we're doing on oncology.

It's not my expectation that we'll add to that this year, certainly next year, I think we'll get to the point where the business will have grown to the point where it'll demand adding some sales capability.

Okay. Could you elaborate a bit on the uniqueness of the approach in cancer and in neurology versus existing approaches? You're saying you're going to see this pull from these customers because it's so unique and different. Maybe just elaborate a bit on just the key performance metrics about the platforms that are out there today doing this and then the economics. The instrument cost, the assay cost, I know, as you look to launch in 2027, I think the instrument was $1 million. Just wondering how the profile on the economics for customers will look.

Maybe Parag will take the first half of that question, and then I'll dive in on the second half.

Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the critical aspects for to think about, Dan, is that there is no other platform in the world that can measure proteoforms at scale. Full stop. The ability to discern a combination of an isoform plus multiple post-translational modifications is an attribute that is unique to our platform and our platform alone. We've heard from customers things like, "Literally, I have always wanted to be able to measure that. I believe this is critical to understanding how signaling works, what therapeutics are likely to work, what patients need to be targeted by looking at that combination of isoforms and post-translational modifications together." That is an incredibly differentiated data type because we are literally the only platform in the world that can make the measurement at scale.

When you start applying that to critical therapeutic targets, AKT1 being the one we're starting with, then moving, as we mentioned, to other high-priority targets, this is something that from the customer side, they recognize immediately that this is an important measurement and something that they believe is critical to the core biological processes. As a contrast, the existing players out there, either targeted or more broad scale, are focused dominantly on singular measurements, so antibody aptamer measurements of total protein going up and down, and they lack this additional layer of detail that confers so much specificity to the measurement.

Thanks, Parag. Dan, to answer the second half of your question, the feedback that we have heard from customers through a few different market research studies that we've conducted and a formal conjoint analysis on pricing show that the platform's capabilities, even with just the proteoform content, as long as there are sufficient panels to have an instrument busy, it supports the case for an instrument at roughly the million-dollar price point, which is the price point that we have stated as our target, and it continues to be our target. As we open the instrument and platform for pre-orders at the beginning of next year, before that, we will announce our final pricing. It might move up or down a little, but roughly $1 million for an instrument deal is what we expect for the instrument.

As we've previously said, depending on the assay and the target and so forth, the pricing might vary a little bit for the price per sample, but roughly a few thousand dollars a sample for kits for the platform.

All right. Maybe I'm going to sneak in one other. How do we think about, therefore, you're focusing on the AKT1. It's a million-dollar instrument. Could you get 10 customers next year? Just any way to think about, just given the cash and the burn and just trying to think about what the revenue opportunity could look like as you launch commercially and how investors get comfortable with that burn. Obviously, if the revenue starts to accelerate, it gives people some confidence. Just anything you can help with a funnel or how to think about the early traction that you might be able to achieve over the first couple of years with your first targeted assays.

Yeah, I think the way to think about that, I wouldn't necessarily answer a question of how many customers or so forth. What I will say is if you go back through the remarks that Parag made in terms of the rollout of these different assays and as well, for you and for investors, when we update our investor presentation and our SEC filings by end of day today after market close, you'll also find a visual of our timeline. What you'll see is where we are with our tau assay, which we expect to have in general availability with the instrument launch, AKT1 as well. You'll see oncology proteoforms two and three, which are slated for the middle of the year, lined up with platform launch, and then slightly after for general availability for the third.

We've previously said that the ones we're working on today in development are AKT1, p53, and EGFR. Those are likely to be the three in oncology. From that point, you also see that as we move forward, that we continue to add proteoform assays, and on that chart you'll see us go through five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, and so forth. There's a lot of content there. As well on that slide, what you'll see is something Parag talked about in his opening remarks, which is that we have a set of enhancement to these assays, some enhancements that affect all the assays, some that are assay-specific, that enable us to introduce new sample types like cerebrospinal fluid for tau, that enable us to have lower sample inputs, so we can support blood and oncology.

Those types of advances are slated to be introduced on a steady schedule as well. When you take all of those together, we think that is a substantial commercial opportunity. For us, when you ask how many customers, I think that we're going to have plenty of customers on early access, and I'm excited about that. I also think that we're going to have enough content to start to drive instrument demand. With a roughly $1 million deal, that's the biggest lever on the top line in the near term. I'm not going to put a size and shape around that opportunity, but as we start to get into next year, I think we'll have more for you. In total, I think it's an exciting opportunity. It's just a little too early for us to put numbers around it.

Okay, great. Thank you.

Yeah.

One moment for our next question. Our next question comes from Subbu Nambi with Guggenheim. Your line is open.

Hi, guys. This is Thomas on for Subbu. Thanks for taking our question. Maybe just to pick up there on pre-orders. Other peers have noted academic markets appear to be largely stabilized and linked. Just curious the latest you've seen in that end market and just the confidence you have in customers having the funds to commit to pre-orders for full-priced instrumentation towards the end of this year and into next. Thanks.

Maybe I'll take that one, Thomas. I think let's first kind of separate the customers in the U.S., North America, more broadly. In the biopharma space, where we are less active today, but expect that we will begin to grow our book of business as we start to move these products through our roadmap. I think that what we've seen in conversations is that budgets are stable, that they're not affected by any external forces, I think that some of the early results that we've seen out of the Dx and tool space and the larger caps have supported that. That's what we're seeing as well.

On the academic nonprofit research side, where NIH funding and government funding is a significant factor, I think that what I've said before is probably what we're seeing now, which is that there's still a little bit of choppiness out there where, oh, I was expecting this much, but I only got that much, and I think this is coming, but it's a little delayed. That choppiness is probably improving a little bit. As well, as we think about the types of customers that we're going after on the academic side, there certainly is NIH dollars there. There are NIH dollars that are going into funding those projects for our customers, and we're continuing to see that they're getting funded, that they're having dollars available.

I think that I'd say that funding climate is improving a little bit, and we'll see how it is as we start to tap into next year.

Great. Maybe just to follow up on the revenue this year, just curious what the split is for the second half in terms of grant revenue from Michael J. Fox, and just what you can expect from the services side as well.

Sure, Thomas, I can speak to that. As you heard us say, we reported our first revenue with Michael J. Fox this quarter. That was the primary driver of revenue. Now that work is underway, I would anticipate that we would see fairly steady revenue coming from those efforts through 2026 and into 2027. Although the amounts might vary a little bit depending on the type of work that's being done in any particular quarter. We do have a sales team now, and they're engaging with customers every day. In that case, I would expect some additional early access customers, although I don't anticipate that to be a major driver of revenue this year.

Thomas, one of the things I do want to add to that, just to point out so that you think about it from a modeling perspective, we think about our top line. Today, our sales team is doing early market activities around oncology, largely they're out selling the tau assay. Our tau assay today only supports brain tissue as a sample type, brain tissue is a fairly rare sample in neurodegeneration research. Roughly nine out of 10 of those conversations is, "Holy mackerel, this is amazing technology. Do you support CSF or blood?" The answer is, it's coming soon. That's nine out of 10 of our sales cycles. With oncology, the prevalence of tissue samples is much more normal, much more common, the market size is larger.

We think that in the near term, that puts oncology at 5-10 times the size serviceable opportunity relative to neurodegeneration, not because of raw market size, but because of sample types that we support. We expect that enabling biofluids in oncology will be a little bit easier than neurodegeneration, which is what Parag said, that CSF support for neurodegeneration, for tau specifically, is something we expect in 2028. For oncology, we expect to be able to reach there earlier. You'll see all of that on our roadmap, which will be in our filings at the end of the day today. With that, I would think about it as AKT1 being a significant unlock of serviceable opportunity for us.

If that early access comes here this year, as we start to enter the beginning of next year, I think that you'll start seeing the oncology business ramping significantly faster than neurodegeneration just because of the way that the various sample types supported roll out on our roadmap.

Super helpful. Thank you, guys.

Yeah.

Again, ladies and gentlemen, if you have a question or a comment at this time, please press star one one on your telephone. I'm not showing any further questions at this time, and as such, this does conclude today's presentation. We thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect, and have a wonderful day.

Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Nautilus Biotechnology First Quarter 2026 conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to our first speaker today, Jian Yi, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you. Earlier today, Nautilus Biotechnology released financial results for the quarter ended March 31, 2026. If you haven't received this news release or if you'd like to be added to the company's distribution list, please send an email to [email protected]. Joining me today from Nautilus are Sujal Patel, Co-founder and CEO, Parag Mallick, Co-founder and Chief Scientist, and Anna Mowry, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that management will make statements during this call that are forward-looking within the meaning of the federal securities laws. These statements involve material risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results or events to materially differ from those anticipated. Additional information regarding these risks and uncertainties appears in the section entitled Forward-Looking Statements in the press release Nautilus issued today.

Except as required by law, Nautilus disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any financial or product pipeline projections or other forward-looking statements, whether because of new information, future events, or otherwise. This conference call contains time-sensitive information and is accurate only as of the live broadcast on April 28, 2026. With that, I'll turn the call over to Sujal.

Thanks, Jian, thank you all for joining us today. Before turning to the quarter, I'd like to begin by recapping the Q1 announcements we highlighted on our last earnings call. At that time, we discussed the launch of our Iterative Mapping Early Access Program in January, the debut of the Voyager Platform to the proteomics community at US HUPO in St. Louis, Missouri, and our announcement of a collaboration with the Michael J. Fox Foundation and Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar to advance development of an alpha-synuclein proteoform assay for Parkinson's disease. We also highlighted our progress moving into the later stages of our broad-scale assay configuration change and our plans to make 2026 a pivotal year focused on commercialization.

We also outlined a series of key milestones for 2026, including progressing early access customers into active Tau services projects, expanding early access in the second half of the year to include a second proteoform assay focused on an oncology target, introducing broad scale capabilities into early access later in 2026, and placing Voyager instruments externally through beta deployments. We also said we expect to initiate our commercial launch in late 2026 by opening the platform for pre-orders with customer installations beginning in early 2027. This would be followed by general availability of broad scale capabilities in the first half of 2027. This quarter, I'm pleased to say we are executing well against that roadmap. Today, we'll discuss the meaningful steps we've taken toward commercialization, including building out our commercial team and growing customer engagement in the early access program.

We'll also cover the scientific and technical progress we've made across our Iterative Mapping assay portfolio, as well as how we continue to manage our resources prudently while investing in the opportunities ahead. A key priority for 2026 has been building the commercial organization needed to support launch activities. During the quarter, we welcomed Amber Faust as our VP of Global Sales, and we have since hired two additional sales team members. These are experienced industry veterans thoughtfully selected for their expertise and commitment to the field of proteomics, and we're excited about the depth of expertise they bring. With this team in place, we believe we are well-positioned to engage prospective customers ahead of our commercial launch.

Building on the successful launch of our Iterative Mapping Early Access Program in January, we're pleased to report growing momentum and customer interest for the Tau assay and for custom assay development. Inbound interest has been steady and broad-based, spanning academic centers, nonprofit research institutions, and biopharma organizations. Today, we're excited to reiterate that last month, we announced our first named EAP customer, Baylor College of Medicine. Combined with our existing collaborations, we're pleased to be working with several academic institutions with deep expertise in proteomics and disease research. This is a meaningful milestone. We believe that it reflects the excitement top-tier institutions are placing in the Voyager Platform and marks an important step in translating our development progress into active, real-world scientific partnerships.

While these early engagements are not intended to drive near-term revenue, they are designed to enable real biological discovery, support publications and grant applications, and ensure our workflows and data outputs align closely with customer needs. Importantly, we are beginning to receive requests to expand similar offerings into oncology-focused targets as well. What has been particularly encouraging is the quality of customer engagement we are observing. Researchers are increasingly recognizing how Nautilus' single molecule analysis of proteoforms and proteomes produces unique and highly differentiated data. We view this data as critically important across a variety of biological questions and also as a powerful foundation for training next generation AI models. Taken together, we believe these developments represent meaningful steps towards commercialization and reinforce our confidence that we have a highly differentiated platform and are addressing important unmet needs in the market.

On the technology front, we continue to make progress advancing the core Voyager Platform designed to execute a diverse family of Iterative Mapping based assays. On the targeted proteoform assay front, we move forward with our oncology proteoform target down selection process, narrowing our focus to the highest priority candidates for our next Early Access Program expansion. On the broad scale front, we continue to advance our assay configuration changes and improve assay performance. Parag will walk through these technical updates in more depth. With that, I'll turn the call over to Parag.

Thanks, Sujal. Overall, Q1 was a productive quarter for our product and scientific teams. From the Voyager Platform development perspective, we made meaningful progress across our assay portfolio. In addition, we gained greater clarity on the remaining work required to reach our next assay development milestones. Critically, we are also increasingly applying the platform to generate biological insights not accessible to existing proteomics technologies, which drives enthusiasm and engagement from the scientific community. In addition to our ongoing platform and assay development activities, we continue to advance exciting studies with our collaborators. These studies highlight the unique insights enabled by Iterative Mapping and by the Voyager Platform. During Q1, we continued supporting the Buck Institute for Research on Aging and Allen Institute for Brain Science as they advance findings toward publication.

We believe that these projects have generated the most extensive and quantitative view of the Tau proteoform landscape to date. These studies now span multiple genetic risk factors, brain regions, and disease severities, clearly demonstrating that Iterative Mapping can reveal biology beyond the reach of conventional proteomics. Taken together, these studies show that our data is not only technically robust, but biologically meaningful. We believe this new class of proteoform-level information can deepen understanding of disease mechanisms, uncover novel therapeutic targets, and enable more precise biomarkers, ultimately helping improve drug discovery and development. Among the most exciting results were findings from the Buck Institute performed with the Alpha instrument at their site. They specifically examined the relationship between the gene APOE, which is strongly associated with risk of early onset Alzheimer's disease and proteoforms of Tau. The specific linkage between APOE and Tau was previously intractable to study.

The Buck Institute's data revealed for the first time distinctive proteoform distributions associated with APOE mutations. We look forward to them sharing their findings in a forthcoming manuscript submission. Progress on proteoform assays was strong in Q1. During the quarter, we formalized our service lab capability to process customer samples, an important operational milestone as we support the Iterative Mapping early access program. Underpinning this milestone, we completed a formal verification and validation study of the service lab and also standardized our customer-facing data and results packages so that researchers receive consistent publication quality outputs. The assay, as performed within our service lab, passed verification, demonstrating that it met our requirements for accuracy, dynamic range, reproducibility, and stability. We look forward to sharing initial biological findings from our early access program engagements in future quarters.

In parallel, we advanced our alpha-synuclein proteoform program under the Michael J. Fox Foundation funded collaboration with Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar. During Q1, we made early progress on assay development using commercially available affinity reagents. Although custom reagent development from our Weill Cornell collaborators experienced delays related to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, we progressed the assay with commercially available reagents and will incorporate collaborator-developed reagents as they become available. Despite this timing shift, the program is on track scientifically, and we view this collaboration as an important opportunity to further demonstrate the breadth of Iterative Mapping beyond Tau. While much of our current momentum is in neurodegeneration, it's important to emphasize that Iterative Mapping is a highly general approach and not limited to neuroscience. We see meaningful long-term potential across oncology, immunology, cardiology, and beyond. In Q1, we made meaningful progress on our oncology proteoform down selection process.

After evaluating multiple candidate proteins across key oncology indications, we have narrowed our focus to a prioritized set of targets that we believe offer the strongest combination of biological relevance, assay feasibility, and customer interest. Examples of proteins we are examining for developing proteoform assays include EGFR, AKT1, and P53. Proteins like these have been prioritized from a larger field of candidates because they represent a wide spectrum of proteoform complexity that is clearly connected to disease processes of interest in pharma and across biomedical research. Critically, they are among the most clinically relevant signaling proteins in cancer biology. EGFR is a well-validated oncology target with numerous approved therapies and known resistance-driving proteoforms. AKT1 sits at the nexus of the PI3 kinase mTOR pathway and is implicated in a broad range of tumor types with multiple emerging therapeutics. P53 is the most frequently mutated gene in human cancer.

Across each of these targets, proteoform-level resolution is essential to developing next-generation therapies, targeting and optimizing existing therapies, and generally accelerating drug development pipelines. Given our progress in Q1, we believe we are on target for having one oncology-focused proteoform assay enter early access in the second half of 2026, consistent with the timeline we have communicated. We believe oncology represents a compelling next market opportunity, providing access to a broader customer base while also aligning well with the capabilities of the Voyager Platform to deliver proteoform-level resolution and highly reproducible measurement in complex biological systems. In summary, we have made significant progress on both transitioning our existing Iterative Mapping-based proteoform assay to a commercial offering and expanding the portfolio. This quarter also saw good progress on advancing our Iterative Mapping assay for broad-scale proteome analysis.

As a reminder, the core components of the Voyager Platform are assay agnostic, relying upon the same instrument and software stack. The primary differences between the assays are in the consumables. Consequently, advances in the maturity of targeted proteoform assays carry over to supporting broad-scale assays. This quarter, we saw advances in key components of our broad-scale assay configuration, including in our flow cells, surface chemistry, and computational models that are expected to form the basis of our launch configuration. We have seen performance improvements with each iteration and side-by-side comparisons of our new assay configuration versus the prior configuration show meaningful gains in critical areas, including our ability to increase the percentage of our affinity reagent catalog that is compatible with our assay configuration.

In previous quarters, we had mentioned that we were concurrently iterating our assay configuration alongside testing a large portion of our affinity reagent catalog on new configurations towards the goal of increasing the percentage of our catalog that is compatible with our assay configuration. Concretely, our current catalog consists of thousands of probes that have been shown to bind to trimer epitope targets. However, this is the first step in a rigorous characterization process that includes verifying probes bind in a given assay configuration with strong differentiation between on-target and off-target binding in a single molecule context. In addition, extensive profiling is performed to define models for which epitopes each probe recognizes. We require each of these criteria to declare a probe to be assay compatible. In Q1, we nearly tripled the number of probes that have been qualified as compatible.

The major driver of this increase has been the newer assay configurations and our work testing a larger portion of the catalog through these configurations. Outside of these studies, we also achieved our largest number of high cycle decode experiments to date. Furthermore, we have been continually stepping up the complexity of our sample inputs and are now routinely including lysate mixtures and full lysates in our large-scale experiments. Additionally, we are now actively developing a validation pipeline for single molecule identifications, an important commitment to scientific rigor. Because the Voyager Platform may identify proteins at levels not previously observable, we are focused on ensuring we have robust methods to validate those identifications and benchmark them against orthogonal analysis methods. We expect to provide further updates as this work progresses through the year.

Overall, we believe the progress this quarter reflects maturation of the Voyager Platform across both commercial-ready targeted applications and next generation broad scale capabilities. With that, I'll turn the call over to Anna to review our financials.

Thanks, Parag. Turning to our financial update, we continue to demonstrate prudent management of both operating expenses and cash, and we remain on track or better against the full year guidance we previously provided. Total operating expenses were $16.1 million for the first quarter of 2026, a decrease of 14% from the prior-year period. Research and development expenses were $9.7 million for the first quarter of 2026, a decrease of 16% from the prior-year period. This decrease was driven primarily by a $1.0 million decrease in salaries and related benefits related to the reduction in force implemented in the first quarter of 2025, with the remaining portion coming from reduced development costs, lower facilities costs, and lower stock compensation expense.

General and administrative expenses were $6.4 million for the first quarter of 2026, a decrease of 12% from the prior year period. The decrease was primarily due to a $0.6 million decrease in stock-based compensation expense, along with a $0.3 million decrease in salaries and related benefits. We ended the first quarter of 2026 with $143.4 million in cash equivalents and investments. Cash burn in Q1 2026 was $12.8 million, which benefited from lower spend overall and $1.1 million in cash generated from stock option exercises. Based on our current trajectory, we still believe our financial plan supports a cash runway that extends through 2027. With respect to revenue, recognition associated with the Michael Joe. Fox Foundation grant has moved more slowly than originally anticipated due to delays related to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.We continue to expect approximately $0.5 million in total revenue for the year, with a greater portion now shifting into later quarters. We remain confident in our financial plan and believe our capital position supports execution against our strategic milestones. Back to you, Sujal.

Thanks, Anna. To close, this quarter represented another period of solid execution against the plan we laid out for 2026. We're making meaningful progress toward commercial launch through the build-out of our commercial team, growing our Iterative Mapping Early Access Program customer engagement, and improving market awareness. At the same time, we're advancing the Voyager Platform performance overall, improving the science behind both our targeted and broad scale offerings, and expanding the proteoform portfolio into additional disease areas such as oncology. We remain focused on the milestones we previously described for 2026 and believe the work completed this quarter keeps us on a strong path toward launch readiness. I'm proud of what the team has accomplished and grateful to our collaborators, customers and shareholders for their ongoing support. Thank you for joining us today. With that, we'll be happy to take your questions. Operator.

Thank you very much. At this time, we will conduct the question and answer session. As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from the line of Subbu Nambi of Guggenheim. Your line is open.

Hey, guys. Good morning. My first question is, how many customers are actively submitting samples through Tau early access today? What's the sample throughput been like?

Good morning, Subbu. This is Sujal. To answer your question, the only launch EAP customer that we've announced so far is Baylor College of Medicine. The EAP pipeline, the service offering, is being used for a number of collaborator samples, and Parag can comment on a few of those names that he had mentioned in the prepared remarks.

Absolutely. I think amongst continued work with the Allen Institute, the Neural Stem Cell Institute and others are actively ongoing.

Perfect. Thank you, guys. Beyond Buck, Allen and Baylor, how many active engagements do you have in the pipeline right now? You mentioned you have exposure or interest from both academic, nonprofit, and pharma, I was just wondering about the mix there.

What I would say is that, it's important to recognize that Amber Faust, our VP of Global Sales, just joined us, I think just about two months ago here, and we have two additional members in the sales organization. A team of three. That team came together last Monday and yesterday, it's still very early in the development of our commercial sales organization, we're really excited to have what we consider to be a full team right now. As we are beginning to prospect for customers for the Tau Early Access Program and as well starting to build the early pipeline, for our oncology targets, you know, the sales cycles are a little bit different between academic and pharma.

We've got, you know, a few very engaged on the academic side that are very interested in moving forward on the Tau side of things. We're just starting to see some really interesting and compelling activity from pharma. We're looking forward to the sales team that's just been hired to pick up those engagements and start to build that pipeline further as we move through the year with Tau early access and as we enter early access for our oncology proteoform in the second half of the year.

Super helpful. I know this is all early, but we're just trying to get a sense of early engagement. My last question, when a pharma company evaluates the Nautilus technology, what's the typical diligence process look like? Are they asking for a head-to-head comparison against any existing solution, or are they evaluating this as a net new capability?

Yeah. Parag, do you want to take this one and then I can add some color?

Absolutely. I think one of the things that we're seeing very clearly is that it's incredibly apparent to people that our platform is hugely differentiated relative to existing platforms, both mass spectrometry and typical affinity-based platforms. Oftentimes the conversations really are about the diligence is them looking through our submitted manuscripts, asking us many technical questions, really digging into how the technology works and the data that we've generated so far. There is significantly less interest in head-to-heads, I would say, because it's clear that the data that we generate is very different than the data that comes out of existing platforms.

Yeah. This is Sujal. Just to add, one comment, put a fine point on this. I think, you know, having been at US HUPO myself in the last quarter and talking to a lot of prospective customers and KOLs, I think that the thing that's most exciting for the folks that I talk to is that the data that we generate with this Tau proteoform assay and that we will generate with our future proteoform assays is data that isn't reasonably collectible with any other method on the planet. There's no other way to gather this data.

What that gives us is it gives us a very unique conversation and a very powerful conversation to have with the customer, which is very different from other newer entrants in the Dx and tool space, where they come in with technology that might be cheaper, it might be higher performing. This is net new biological insight that the world hasn't seen, that increasingly, as we look at our collaborators' work, seems to be incredibly relevant to disease pathology and incredibly relevant to human health.

Thank you so much, guys.

Thank you very much. Our next call comes from the line of Dan Brennan of TD Cowen. Dan, your line is open.

Hey, good morning. This is Kyle on for Dan. Just want to start maybe on the oncology side, I guess. What's the reception been so far on oncology samples, and is Baylor ready to run them on-site?

Great. You know, as I kind of mentioned, the reception from potential customers to the EAP program's capabilities, Tau assay capabilities has been really incredible. If you'll recall, today we have a Tau services offering. That means customer sends us a sample, we analyze it in our facility, and we send back a standardized report package to the customer. As Parag mentioned in prepared remarks, that is the service offering that has now fully completed verification and validation, and the first set of official EAP customer samples that'll go through, i.e., not including our collaborators, which are already going through, will be the Baylor College of Medicine, which will happen shortly.

You'll also recall, not from this earnings call, but from previous ones, that we have one Alpha unit that's been in the field for approximately a year, maybe a little bit over a year. That Alpha unit is physically in the lab at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging.

When the Buck generates data, the Buck is generating on their own instrument, all of the other engagements for early access will be through our service offering until we reach the second half of the year, where we do expect in late Q3 and Q4 to begin placing a few beta units with additional customers to prove out the on-site capabilities, the kits, the shipping, and work through final bits of feedback ahead of a planned commercial launch as we hit the end of the year, with first instrument availability and shipping in the beginning of next year.

Got it. Maybe just on the broad scale assay configuration, it sounds like it's progressing well there, but are there any technical hurdles that you still have to overcome before it's, you know, ready for launch?

Maybe I'll take this, maybe I'll take this one, Dan. I think as we've messaged, and you're correct in your assessment, we have definitely made tremendous progress on that assay configuration and the set of iterations of configurations that we've been working through. In addition, we've made tremendous progress on characterizing the library and how it is performant in these iterations of the configuration. In terms of technical work, you know, I think as we went through with the Tau service offering, you know, once we had the assay up and running and stable and were very happy with its performance, we then went through an incredibly rigorous verification and validation process as well.

As we look forward, that's really the work that we're looking forward to, is getting to a place where we are happy with the performance characteristics of the assay and then have done the full suite of verification and validation before we place it in customers' hands.

Got it. Thank you.

Thank you very much. This concludes our question and answer session. At this time, thank you for your participation in today's conference, and this does conclude our program. You may now disconnect.